The Vessel Chapter 2

When the old abbot died, everything changed.

It wasnt noticeable at first.

Slowly, the rest of the village began to turn Xenon over in their minds.

Frowns began to sprout like taproots.

By the end of the wet season, the whole village passed grimaces between houses like sickness.

As they passed his flower garden, as they enjoyed his delicious vegetables and berries, they began to hate him.

Xenon felt the shift, but it was outside of his little world. He could care less what they felt.

The new abbot was young and wanted to make a big impression.

Before he ever vocally chose Xenon as the water's divine example, it was decided that the old man was a Problem.

In council meetings, Xenon's garden was argued about.

The older clerics knew Xenon risked his own life by sharing his water with the plants. He had cultivated and shared many melons with the diocese. It was well known that this man was indeed a quirk, an anomaly, but he had never been a threat.

The new abbot worked on them. He shamed their love of Xenon's flowers. He constantly questioned their loyalty to the Water. They were the holiest of vessels and yet they allowed space for this heretic to grow unusable, wasteful weeds.

By the middle of the dry season, most of the council had been bullied or bribed into agreement. The Problem had to be Solved.

It was the exact middle of the dry season. Xenon counted the days on his special planting calendar and he was sure they were precisely mid way between the yearly rainy seasons.

It had been difficult to keep his flowers alive in the dry heat.

Each day he nearly gave them his entire allotment of water.

He took his hydration in the form of celery and his prized melons.

Before the old abbot had died, Xenon always took the best melon for himself. He never felt bad about this, although the church taught him to be ashamed even as he took the roundest melon with the best scent.

But since the new abbot's arrival, all food and trade goods had to visit the church at the bottom of the hill, where the water collected in a natural swamp.

Xenon resented the church more and more each year. The priests had no cultivation skills. They were constantly bullying the villagers to pay alms.

The swamp was extremely holy, and access was forbidden.

When Xenon made his final trip to the church, he looked out over the wetlands. The precious water had dried up in the drought, but the skunk cabbages and ferns were a riot of green.

Heat radiated from the trees. Cicadas screamed their life-song into the air. The air was hot and smelled of his flowers and skunk cabbage and of the clean ozone oozing out of the drying mud.

The sun was still hot, baking the ground into little tiles. Xenon pulled his cart of melons along behind him.

He had left his best one at home. It was shameful, but his resentment towards the new abbot and his teachings had pushed him out of piousness into cold defiance.

The new abbot had changed everything. The village was once been bright and hopeful, but the people scurried around the streets more often than not. And they rarely gathered in the square for birthdays or weddings.

Xenon had never been married. He'd never had an interest in anyone.

He had tried to pair off early in life, but found himself lacking some sort of key information everyone else seemed to have.

Even the same sex couples were beyond him. Romance and sex seemed... uncomfortable, unreal.

He often wondered if he was broken, but those thoughts hurt everything they touched, and he made a great effort to redirect them when they came.

Instead, he had raised his flowers, his melons, and berries. He talked to the bees and worms. He gave love to the earth and thanked her for the life blood she bestowed.

He danced in the rain with everyone else.

But he had never felt like a part of the village. He never felt a sense of belonging unless he was surrounded by nature.

As he trudged downward towards the swamp, he began to hear it.

A crowd had gathered outside of the church.

That was unusual in and of itself, but the sounds also seemed keyed up in a bad way. He heard no children. The noise was chaotic and sharp.

Angry faces appeared and disappeared in the mass if bodies and he was reminded of a swarm of ants.

He sensed that they would react as one mind.

The abbot was visible standing at his outdoor pulpit, usually reserved for rain day celebrations, he was yelling and pounding on the wood.

Xenon stopped walking. His sense of danger screamed at him. He slowly put down his melon cart. The crowd hadn't seen him, yet.

He knew they were there for him.

It had been clear to see that the abbot was making him into the town scapegoat. The drought would be blamed on him. Then the diseases that normally raged through the little village each year would become mysterious and he would again be found as the source of their illness.

This had happened once before.

The town had turned on an old lady who's wife had died while hunting.

She had never remarried or taken in any children as was custom. She left the village and lived in a shack up hill, away from the fumes of the swamp. She refused to attend church.

Xenon had been a boy, only 7 years old, when they lynched the her.

She had taken to yelling profanity and threatening anyone who approached her shack.

There had been break-ins- pranks, mostly- vandalism, and once someone had set fire to her home, the worst crime of all, since fire would evaporate the body's water. No one ever came forward.

She remained as a nuisance in her shack until the drought.

The worst drought in 10 years. The town was lightening quick to blame their troubles on the poor old woman, who could barely see and who tended her own vegetables and home without help.

As a group, his parents and the other villagers had stormed her home and dragged her out to hang from a rope. He had nightmares about it for years afterwards.

Her body had been hung from a huge live oak tree outside the church. The crows ate her eyes first, then her guts.

Xenon remembered passing it as he went into services. His parents shushed his questions with a quick slap. Her skeleton remained until it finally fell into the swamp and was reclaimed.

Xenon remembered and he stopped the wagon before he got too close.

They were expecting him. They would kill him and his precious flowers would die trampled and ripped up.

Tears blurred his vision. He breathed deeply and walked away from the wagon at a brisk pace towards his house. If he was fast enough, he could pack his seeds and clothes and a few days good traveling food.